But God, I love the cul-de-sac
at seven a.m., I can’t help it!
This wind-streaming-between-
grass-blades point of view!
 
But this punctuated lawn
I stand upon! The family 
of shrubs, flat-topped & shaped
into a question mark:
 
the eye of its mouth, my favorite
standing place. A painter’s steel
scaffold: against the neighbor’s
gutter like a concert glockenspiel.
 
The souped-up air conditioning:
     in monk octaves. The sheer
wash of it all, water rushing
from a bucket:          A man soaping
 
down his Saab, tie sly tucked.
Two cable guys sharing a joint
in a horseshoe drive:          But God,
I envy their temporary sweet spot:
 
snippet of carefree chummery.
This mum machine hard at work
before work. The:          The nothing
getting in. The nothing getting out:
 

From Silencer (Mariner Books, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Marcus Wicker. Used with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

dear reader, with our heels digging into the good 
mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something 
about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself 
but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown 
& lord knows I have been called by what I look like 
more than I have been called by what I actually am & 
I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this 
exercise. which, too, is an attempt at fashioning 
something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything 
worthwhile of their burial. size me up & skip whatever semantics arrive 
to the tongue first. say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather 
clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent 
heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning, 
you could scatter his whole mind across a field.

Copyright © 2018 by Hanif Abdurraqib. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 4, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

the poem begins not where the knife enters

but where the blade twists.

Some wounds cannot be hushed

no matter the way one writes of blood

& what reflection arrives in its pooling.

The poem begins with pain as a mirror

inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me

before my first funeral & so the poem begins

with old grief again at my neck. On the radio,

a singer born in a place where children watch the sky

for bombs is trying to sell me on love

as something akin to war.

I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.

I was most like the bullet when I viewed the body as a door.

I’m past that now. No one will bury their kin

when desire becomes a fugitive

between us. There will be no folded flag

at the doorstep. A person only gets to be called a widow once,

and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.

Gratitude, not for love itself, but for the way it can end

without a house on fire.

This is how I plan to leave next.

Unceremonious as birth in a country overrun

by the ungrateful living. The poem begins with a chain

of well-meaning liars walking one by one

off the earth’s edge. That’s who died

and made me king. Who died and made you.

Copyright © 2019 by Hanif Abdurraqib. From A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House Books, 2019). Used with permission of the author and Tin House Books. 

in the backseat, my sons laugh & tussle,

far from Tamir’s age, adorned with his

complexion & cadence, & already warned

about toy pistols, though my rhetoric

ain’t about fear, but dislike—about

how guns have haunted me since I first gripped

a pistol; I think of Tamir, twice-blink

& confront my weeping’s inadequacy, how

some loss invents the geometry that baffles.

The Second Amendment—cold, cruel,

a constitutional violence, a ruthless

thing worrying me still, should be it predicts

the heft in my hand, arm sag, burdened by

what I bear: My bare arms collaged

with wings as if hope alone can bring

back a buried child. A child, a toy gun,

a blue shield’s rapid rapid rabid shit. This

is how misery sounds: my boys

playing in the backseat juxtaposed against

a twelve-year-old’s murder playing

in my head. My tongue cleaves to the roof

of my mouth, my right hand has forgotten.

This is the brick & mortar of the America

that murdered Tamir & may stalk the laughter

in my backseat. I am a father driving

his Black sons to school & the death

of a Black boy rides shotgun & this

could be a funeral procession, the death

a silent thing in the air, unmentioned—

because mentioning death invites taboo:

if you touch my sons the blood washed

away from the concrete must, at some

point, belong to you, & not just to you, to

the artifice of justice that is draped like a blue

g-d around your shoulders, the badge that

justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo:

the thing that says freedom is a murderer’s body

mangled & disrupted by my constitutional

rights come to burden, because the killer’s mind

refused the narrative of a brown child, his dignity,

his right to breathe, his actual fucking existence,

with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when

my boys first reached for me. This world best

invite more than story of the children bleeding

on crisp falls days, Tamir’s death must be more

than warning about recklessness & abandoned

justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is

why I hate it all, the protests & their counters,

the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies

of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces

humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are



not permitted to articulate the reasons we might

yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon

sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood?

But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir

& I am bound to be haunted by the strength

that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist

the temptation to turn everything they see

into a grave & make home the series of cells

that so many brothers already call their tomb.

From Felon. Copyright © 2019 by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.